Stieg Larsson, My Friend

by Kurdo Baksi

  “It’s time to take some decisions,” he said, leaning back in the little chair at the rear of the café. “I’ve been looking for a collaborator who will allow Expo to go its own way. I want to work with a journal without links to any particular political party. I’m tired of people accusing us of being a journal linked to the left.”

  Then he leaned forward and looked me in the eye.

  “I’ll come clean. We have about sixty kronor in the kitty. Do you think you could come to Expo’s rescue?”

  I sat there in astonishment.

  “How do you think that would be possible?”

  “I thought you’d ask that,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette. The smile I was so familiar with returned to his face, those sparkling eyes and the gesticulating hands. “I want Expo and Svartvitt to join forces. Expo will be a financial burden, but you’ll earn a lot of goodwill. Besides, I’m convinced that you will be rewarded some time in the future.”

  I couldn’t help laughing at such an optimistic prophesy, but Stieg merely brushed my laughter aside and continued.

  “Now to the nitty-gritty. I want you to fund the printing and distribution of Expo. I’ll take care of the editorial side. Svartvitt’s editorial staff are experienced in administering and funding a magazine. My colleagues and I are good at research and journalism, but we don’t seem to be much good at anything else.”

  I leaned back in my chair and wondered what on earth to say. I had thought we were going to have a cup of coffee and chat like we usually did. Now I found myself faced with a proposal to merge our journals.

  I said nothing for quite a while. I agreed totally with Stieg that our publications had a lot in common. Unfortunately the financial state of both operations was also more similar than he seemed to realize. The National Council for Cultural Affairs had just cut Svartvitt’s grant to 30,000 kronor. I had been so angry that I had called it “pin money”, or so some cultural journalists had claimed. In order to make a point I had rejected the grant altogether. To make matters worse, we had just moved into larger premises in Pilgatan. You could hardly say that Svartvitt was in a fit state to take on new costs.

  “I agree with you,” I said in the end. “Expo is too important to be allowed to collapse. I’m prepared to do my bit. But how will it be done, in practical terms? Shall we have two publishers and two editors-in-chief?”

  “I thought Expo’s pages should be yellow instead of white. We’ll design and produce between twelve and twenty-four pages. You’ll pay for the printing and distribution. You can be editorin-chief of both Svartvitt and Expo. Somebody from Expo can be the publisher. That way you can escape being taken to court all the time.”

  We both laughed at that. Stieg continued talking. He seemed to be in an exalted state now, gesticulating more and more wildly, with increasing confidence. I had swallowed the bait, and he knew it.

  “Behind closed doors I will be the editor, but I don’t want my name linked publicly with the job.”

  “As usual, in other words,” I said.

  “Expo and Svartvitt will be two independent and equal journals. None of us will have the right to interfere in the editorial work of the other. Is that sufficiently clear?”

  “How long have you been thinking about this?”

  He smiled and shrugged.

  “Maybe I just thought it up.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me,” I said. “But I have a few questions, Stieg. How come Expo writes so much about equality, but behaves like a men’s club? How can an anti-racist journal find it so difficult to recruit staff with an immigrant background?”

  “I agree. We lack credibility in that respect. We must do something about it immediately.”

  “O.K.,” I said. “Those are my only objections. We can publish our journals jointly – let’s say until the next election. Then we’ll have to take stock and decide if we should continue. But before we shake hands on it, I want to propose a better deal than the one you offered me. We’ll pay for printing and distribution. Can you pay the rent? If we make a profit, which I don’t suppose we shall, we’ll share the profits. If we run at a loss, I’ll be responsible for the entire amount.”

  When we shook hands Stieg smiled more broadly than I had ever seen him do before. Although in fact he seemed more relieved than happy. It was as if a burden had been lifted from his shoulders. Perhaps he wasn’t convinced that he had saved Expo, but he was pretty sure that he had bought enough time to ride out the storm.

  “On Monday,” I said, raising my coffee cup as if in a toast, “I’ll arrange for a contract to be drawn up that both parties can sign. We can’t have any misunderstandings just because you and I are such good friends.”

  He looked hard at me, then rolled another cigarette and lifted a yellow lighter with his left hand.

  “No, Kurdo,” he said rather sternly. “We don’t need a contract. If I didn’t trust you I would never have contacted you in the first place. I know you won’t let me down. An oral promise and a handshake will be sufficient. From January onwards we’ll publish Svartvitt together with Expo. We’ll take care of the rent.”

  “O.K.”

  “What do you say to announcing the merger of Sweden’s two most important anti-racist journals on 30 November?”

  “That sounds like an excellent idea,” I said, realizing that this was something he’d been thinking about in order to attract maximum publicity. It was also practical to supply our combined subscribers with the news about Svartvitt and Expo on the day when nationalists celebrate the exploits of the Swedish warriorking Charles XII. (Why they should want to do that is a bit of a mystery, as his defeat in the Great Northern War effectively brought the Swedish Empire to an end.)

  We said goodbye outside Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå, headquarters of the Swedish Central News Agency, in Scheelegatan. I watched Stieg vanish through the door and found myself thinking about the remarkable baobab tree. For eleven years I had been carefully tending my own little tree known as Svartvitt. It was clear that I was now faced with a major challenge.

  I eventually decided that two trees with similar characteristics would be bound to thrive together. They could support and shade each other in difficult times, which ought to make it easier for both to survive in the barren savannah. I felt happy and contented as I slowly made my way back to my office.

  4

  Stieg as colleague and journalist

  I’ve suddenly remembered something that happened in the early hours of 9 November, 1999. I was staying at the Prize Hotel in Stockholm. The telephone rang at 2.15. Although I was still awake, alarm bells went off inside my head – one seldom receives good news in the middle of the night.

  “Stieg hasn’t come home,” Eva screamed into my mobile.

  She was sniffling and sobbing. I tried to calm her down, but I could feel myself going ice cold. In as soothing a voice as I could manage, I assured her that nothing bad could have happened. A few hours later it became apparent that Stieg had fallen asleep in his office. Probably, now that I think about it, he had been working and had decided, unusually, to lie down on a sofa.

  Today, so many years later, I can laugh at the memory.

  Was that the moment I realized that Stieg was writing books at night? I can’t remember. But I do remember clearly how relieved I was that nothing awful had happened to him.

  When Stieg was appointed to a post as a graphic designer at Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå, he could hardly have realized how long he would be associated with that place of work. Although he maintained throughout those years that T.T. played an important role in independent news-reporting, he had a remarkable love–hate relationship with it. No doubt his appointment was in many ways a sort of revenge as far as he was concerned. Now he could make up for the frustration he had felt on being rejected as an eighteen-year-old by the Stockholm College of Journalism in the autumn of 1972. Now he would show them that their idiotic admissions requirements meant they had lost a reporter who was more than a match for anybody.r />
  It was this lust for revenge which ensured that he had a plan even when he walked for the first time through the door of the Hötorget skyscraper where T.T. was based in the 1970s. He would work at everything he was required to do in the way of illustrations, diagrams, pictures and paste-ups in order to become a fully fledged, damned good reporter in due course.

  Things did not go according to plan, however. He was never given the assignments he expected, and the management appeared to have no interest at all in his ideas.

  Despite this, T.T. came to mean an awful lot to Stieg. It was not simply a matter of earning a living, it was more a question of living or not living. The reasons why he could never bring himself to leave T.T. were mental, not financial.

  I have worked through T.T.’s digital archives in an attempt to track down Stieg’s articles. The first time his name crops up is in January 1982. On 11 July, 1985, his initials – “sla” – appear in print for the first time. In connection with an illustration. Then follow hundreds of illustrations, diagrams, pictures and paste-ups, all signed by him. Strikingly often they are linked with financial articles.

  The first article he wrote dates from 22 January, 1992, and is about the history of the Swedish intelligence agency. If you consider all the years Stieg worked at T.T., he wrote comparatively few articles of any length. I have traced twenty-five written between 1992 and 1999. Eight are tips for crime novels to read at Christmas or during the summer holidays, which is interesting in view of what happened later. The articles show clearly that Stieg was impressed by the novels of Sara Paretsky, Harlan Ellison, Liza Cody and, last but by no means least, Elizabeth George.

  Nevertheless, most of the articles are in his field of expertise: neo-Nazism and racism in Sweden and abroad. Three of them are about the bomb outrage in Oklahoma. Of course, there may be many more unsigned articles by Stieg, and one cannot exclude the possibility that several signed articles were overlooked during the scanning process (those who worked on it have admitted that T.T.’s repository of news articles is far from complete).

  So, although he was fighting against the odds, Stieg hung on at T.T. He was pretty frank about his conviction that obstacles were constantly being placed in his way, not least because his superiors seldom allowed him to write about matters on which he was an expert. Nevertheless he never felt for one second that he was being victimized. Instead, he mounted counterattacks whenever opportunities presented themselves. He even went so far as to organize his own “resistance group” at T.T. This included several members of staff who got on well together and had more or less the same views on journalism. This group supported him when his superiors complained or prevaricated.

  Now, many years later, I find it hard to understand why he behaved as he did. Why this constant battle? Couldn’t he have done what everybody else would have done and simply looked for another job? Sometimes I suspect he liked to create his own battlefield where he could leap up on to his horse and wield his sword and bayonet. The image of Don Quixote occasionally crops up in my mind’s eye.

  Similarly, T.T. seems like a big windmill spinning round at a leisurely pace. Or perhaps a fan belt whizzing round out of sight inside an engine which ought to be changed after a certain number of kilometres but is still there. You almost get the feeling that the whole engine will grind to a halt when the belt eventually snaps. It often seemed as if those in charge at T.T. had no idea how to handle the bolshie employee from the far north who was at one moment an implacable warhorse and at the next moment more like a miserable schoolboy sulking in a corner of the playground. They never knew if he was going to do his own thing – and ignore their rules – or toe the line.

  There is no point in suppressing the fact that on occasion Stieg stretched the rules to breaking point. For instance, as a T.T. reporter he wrote news items about having himself received death threats. Nobody at T.T. seems to have noticed. Or possibly they didn’t have the strength to argue with him and so turned a blind eye. A quick glance at T.T.’s archives shows that in his capacity as a member of the Expo editorial board, he “interviewed” himself five times in the period 1992–9.

  It was precisely this lack of impartiality and relevance that made his position at T.T. so complicated. Such goings-on are far removed from what a news agency ought to be doing. But Stieg simply couldn’t help himself. The moment he sat down at a computer, he took sides for or against.

  These facts make it easy to understand how Expo could have become such an important part of Stieg’s life. The number of articles he wrote for T.T. declined in inverse proportion to his increasing involvement with Expo. Perhaps, paradoxically, this was what forced him to stay on at T.T. He needed his salaried post because Expo’s financial situation was always so awful.

  Early on in our friendship I realized what the force was that drove Stieg: justice – irrespective of class, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. I couldn’t possibly count how many times he said “Everybody is worth the same as everybody else.” Over and over again. Most of us would agree, no doubt; but I have never heard that sentiment expressed with such emphasis and conviction. The concept of justice was an integral part of his being, I don’t know how else to describe it.

  Like many others of his generation, Stieg had grown up with a political vision, in his case Trotskyism. But unlike quite a few of his generation, he never changed his views when money was involved. Financial matters simply did not exist in his conception of the world; he had zero interest in anything to do with money.

  More important to him was the possibility of making a difference without being noticed. That is why it is extremely difficult to imagine how he would have handled his success as an author, forced to take a bow because of all the attention his novels had attracted. But he was a man who worked tirelessly to produce material for the rest of us to present to the general public. A man who wrote vast numbers of appeals and articles, and then asked me to attach my name to them.

  I know that he thought about this because he had premonitions that the Millennium trilogy would be a success. However, for me – and for many others – the biggest question is not how he would have handled his success, but how on earth he managed to produce these books in more or less total secrecy, despite being so busy all the time.

  I sometimes ask myself just how much Stieg worked. I generally answer, “I can’t say when he worked – but I can tell you when he didn’t work. When he was asleep.” I should perhaps mention that when he was not at the office, he was glued to his computer or had his mobile clamped to his ear – two indefatigable “collaborators” of Stieg’s.

  When the time came for the first double edition of Svartvitt and Expo, Stieg had an unusually number of irons in the fire. He was fully occupied with contacting the parents of children who had been exposed to racist violence and with trying to find homes for women who had fled sects or families where they had been living under duress. He was also working intensively to arrange residence permits for homosexuals from Muslim backgrounds. He was helping others to finish books when they got stuck and couldn’t make progress. He was lecturing regularly to Swedish PEN, the Helsinki Committee and Scotland Yard. In addition to all that was the non-stop fund-raising for victims of racism.

  Moreover, Stieg had started digging into an old legal case that later came to be called the Joy Rahman affair and that led to Rahman being released from prison in 2002 and awarded substantial damages. Rahman, employed as a home help, had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994 for strangling a 72-year-old woman she had been working for in southern Stockholm. Stieg was convinced that Rahman was innocent, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had rejected her appeal. He thought that as a journalist I ought to be able to establish Rahman’s innocence simply by reading all the legal documents carefully. He had dumped over a thousand pages of proceedings on my desk. I read all of them, but was not convinced that Rahman had been falsely accused. Stieg disputed my conclusion.

  “You’re not going to win the major journa
lism prize,” he said.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to query the legal process. There were too many details that seemed not to fit and far too many uncertainties. In 2007 the same Joy Rahman was imprisoned for the murder of a man in Bangladesh. I wonder what Stieg would have made of that.

  Despite Stieg’s enormous workload, he always met his deadlines. He never failed to complete a text by the time it was needed. Mind you, whether the article was what had been agreed in the first place was another matter.

  Time was beginning to run out for our first combined issue. It was to contain no more than eight Expo pages: a single-column leader, four news reports, a commentary and a review. Stieg’s article was still outstanding, and was essential if everything was to fit together with the Svartvitt material. That is what we had agreed, and it was important that nothing went wrong. We had too many critics just waiting to pounce if we made a mess of things. And we were in desperate need of new subscribers. In no circumstances must we publish late and give the impression of being unprofessional.

  When Stieg turned up at the editorial office just inside the deadline with his article, I quickly realized that it was not what we had agreed on. It was in fact a book, forty pages long, entitled Euro-Nat – A Europe for Anti-Semites, Ethnic Warriors and Political Crackpots – The Sweden Democrats’ International Network .

  “It’s urgent,” he said. “Can you publish it?”

  “I’ll read it by tomorrow.”

  “No, you must read it now, right away.”

  “But I have to make sure we don’t find ourselves with all sorts of legal problems. We can’t afford that.”

  “You don’t need to worry. The only people I’ve named fully are elected officials. All the others are referred to only by their first names. You’re not risking anything. Can you give me an ISBN number from your Svartvitt list?”